Russia’s indigenous languages at risk of dying out

According to the constitution of Dagestan, all of its languages should be treated as official. Only 14 of them have written forms, and it is only these 14 that get official recognition. Source: Sergei Pyatakov / RIA Novosti

Around 250 languages are spoken in Russia, including Russian, which is spoken by some 150 million people. Russian, along with several Turkic-based languages, is doing fine. However, the linguistic situation for many lost tribes and Small Indigenous People in Russia is far more uncertain.

Russia’s many
languages are the same kind of impenetrable mystery for the country as the
ever-discussed topic of the “Russian soul.” Russian itself is fairly
mysterious, considering the time over which it developed.

From the first
appearance of prose works that were not mere copies of Western models (Nikolai
Karamzin in the late 18th century) to the appearance of the first
experimental writings of the 1920s (such as Velimir Khlebnikov), there is only
just over a century.

Within that feverishly busy century the works of Tolstoy,
Chekhov and many others appeared. Not even America saw that kind of
development, even though they had the whole corpus of English literature to
start from.

How to say “I
love you!” in Russia’s rare languages

Buryat:

‘Bi shamay
durlakha’

[bi] [ʃa’maj]
[durla’ha]

Kabardian:

‘Se ue
lagun’

[Se] [ue] [la’gun]

Kalmyck:

‘Bi chi
durta bolkh’

[bi] [tʃi]
[durtə] [bolh]

Koryak:

‘Gymnan
gychchi ylnu lynyk’

[gim’nan] [gintʃtʃi]
[il’nu] [li’nik]

Khakas:

‘Min sin khynarat’

[min] [sin]
[hina’rat]

The outlook is
good for the Russian language – it appears in vast numbers of publications, it
is diligently studied, it is taught abroad, and it is continuously developing.
A similar situation is found for the languages of Russia’s more numerous ethnic
groups – Tatar, Bashkir, Chuvash and Yakut – which all happen to be
Turkic-group languages.

Even this last group, Yakut, has more than 1.5 million
speakers scattered over one of Russia’s largest regions, Yakutia (1.1 million
square miles), and the language is not endangered.

Books come out in Yakut,
they teach Yakut in schools and colleges, there is a Yakut-speaking mass media
and artistic culture, and it is studied by linguists and ethnologists.

This is all in
dramatic contrast to the situation for languages of Russia’s Small Indigenous
Peoples (a term recognized in United Nations documentation). In fact, such languages
are dying out all over the world, and not only in Russia.

In most cases, the
cause is not bureaucratic neglect or chauvinism, but harsh environmental
conditions – Russia is no exception.

Russia is a sub-polar country in which
huge tracts of land are covered by barely traversable taiga and tundra – like
the Amazon jungles, but with the added factor of fierce cold. “Lost tribes” eke
out their subsistence in these empty wastelands, from the northern Saami to the
southeastern Udegei.

They wage a bitter and not always successful struggle for
life, while communicating in their unwritten languages. It is impossible to
“bestow” the benefits of urban life upon them: Experience has shown that they
have fatally low tolerance levels for disease and alcohol when this has
happened.

Another reason why
languages die out is the peaceful assimilation of their speakers into
populations of the majority-language group.

Related:

This has been the fate of some
dialects of Karelian. “Karelian” is a collective name used for the Finno-Ugric
peoples remaining in the European part of Russia, as well as the term for the
descendants of Orthodox inhabitants of what today is Finland, who fled to
Russia during religious persecution in the Middle Ages.

According to the
Czarist census of 1897, the last Karelians living at Valdai (now a popular lake
resort half-way between Moscow and St. Petersburg) registered as Russians,
but their dialect had died out even earlier.

Karelians living in the more
distant areas of Tver Region and other spaces have kept their language alive
until the present, even though they live closer to Moscow than Valdai. It is
clear that such factors as television, Internet, and military conscription for
national service have exacerbated the language’s demise.

No one knows for
certain how many languages are actually spoken in Russia. Census results in
2010 indicated that people themselves said they spoke up to 250 languages.

There are two main reasons for the confusion. The first is financial: While an
expedition is mounted to some remote area where the last speakers of a language
are said to be living, those last speakers may have moved to using another
language, or may possibly have died.

The second is linguistic: Many languages
are initially assigned unique status, but are later denoted as dialects, or
perhaps vice-versa.

By way of example, we can look at the tiniest ethnic
grouping to be identified in the 2010 census – the Kerek of Chukhotka, of whom
there are just four people. The last field recordings made of the Kerek language
were made in the 1970s, and, in the 2002 census, there were eight people who
identified themselves as Kerek.

None of the Kereks alive have a full working
knowledge of their language – they know some of its vocabulary, in a passive
way only. The Kereks have been almost wholly assimilated by the Chukchi –
another Small Indigenous People, amongst whom they live.

However, there are
also linguists who would say that Kerek is in fact a dialect of Koryak, which
is another minority language with 9,000 speakers (only 2,000 speak it as their
first language).

The State attempts
to provide for the Small Indigenous Peoples of the North, Siberia and Far East
– their young people are given a pass on compulsory national service, while
their hunters and fishermen receive tax breaks.

However, there is one region of
Russia where speakers of unwritten languages are treated with flagrant scorn –
Dagestan, in the North Caucasus.

As long ago as the Middle Ages, Arab
philosophers called the Caucasus “a mountain of languages.” Even in this
linguistically rich area, Dagestan stands out as a linguistic treasure chest:
despite lands which are compact and accessible, more than 50 recognizable
languages are spoken there.

According to the constitution of Dagestan, all of
its languages should be treated as official. Only 14 of them have written forms
(if Russian is counted too), and it is only these 14 that get official
recognition.

Those who speak the non-written languages – who might amount to
everyone in a village, or at least half a village – are traditionally
calculated as being members of one of the more numerous linguistic groups (the
Avars being the most numerous). Thus, they do not benefit from the slightest
relief from taxes, cultural-fund or other social benefits.

The local
authorities may not be carrying out “linguicide” (the purposed extinction of a
language without the murder of its people) in the strictest terms. Linguistic
scholars from the Dagestan Republic and the rest of Russia carry out research
on local languages, publish their findings in academic journals, and attempt to
create viable written forms for them.

Nevertheless, it is not difficult to see
cold incipient linguicide taking place. One example is that of the Botlikhs.
There have been countless meetings and endless petitions in the Botlikh village
to recognize the cultural autonomy of Botlikhs and their language belonging to
the Andi group of Avar-Andi-Tsez languages of the Nakh-Dagestanian family.

Yet
they continue to be classified as Avar speakers, just as they were under
Stalin, the Soviet Union's Commissar for Nationality Issues, in the 1920s. The
result is that only 200 Botlikhs, out of a population of 6,000, know their own
language.

As of January
2013, responsibility for these matters was transferred away from the hands of
the local Dagestan authorities and placed under the remit of the Russian
central government body responsible for intra-ethnic issues.